Joshua Yaffa

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in the winter of 2022, the rock group Bi-2 was on a nationwide tour. The group, a stalwart of the Russian music scene for more than two decades, is known for its […]

During the past few months, the war in Ukraine has remained relatively static on the battlefield. Russia’s offensive operations in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, have slowed. Its minimal gains have been offset by sizable losses in manpower and equipment.

On September 26, 2022, seismic-monitoring stations in northern Europe picked up signals that resembled small earthquakes—rumblings below the surface of the Baltic Sea detected as far as a thousand miles away. Soon after, operators in charge of the Nord Stream

On November 17th, the Biden Administration announced that it would allow Ukraine to fire U.S.-supplied long-range missiles at targets inside Russia. For months, Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials had been pushing for such a change, arguing that Ukraine could

Eight years ago, after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the mood in Moscow was one of lucky disbelief. In Donald Trump, Russian officials saw a transactional businessman who spoke in the language of national interests, not values—Vladimir Putin’s kind of

Volodymyr Zelensky’s situation room, where the Ukrainian President monitors developments in his country’s war with Russia, is a windowless chamber, largely taken up by a rectangular conference table and ringed by blackened screens, deep inside the Presidential Administration Building, in

In January, Erna was having a coffee in her living room in Vienna when she opened a letter from something called the Guter Rat für Rückverteilung, or the Good Council for Redistribution. “Guten Tag Ernestine!” the letter began. “How wealth

In July, prison officials at correctional facility No. 3, near Smolensk, in western Russia, told Ilya Yashin to request a Presidential pardon. Yashin is a longtime activist and opposition politician who, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in